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VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

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Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#91
post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

There is the art of subtitling, and then there is the technical reality that sometimes you have some content with no subtitles and just want a solution now, but the content didn't come with an SRT or better yet VTT and OpenSubtitles has no match.

They're using Whisper for speech to text, and some other small model for basic translation where necessary. It will not do speaker identification (diarization), and certainly isn't going to probe into narrative plot points to figure out if naming a character is a reveal. It isn't going to place text on the screen according to the speaker's frame place, nor for least intrusion. It's just going to have a fixed area where a best effort at speech to text is performed, as a last resort where the alternative is nothing.

Obviously it would be preferred to have carefully crafted subtitles from the content creator, translating if the desired language isn't available but still using all the cues and positions. Secondly to have some carefully crafted community subtitles from opensubtitles or the like, maybe where someone used "AI" and then hand positioned/corrected/updated. Failing all that, you fall to this.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#92
post #80
post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

Why are we still talking about this? Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient. Computation is really negligible in the grand scheme of things. In the 80s some people also said that our whole world energy would go to computations in the future. And look today. It’s less than 1%. We do orders of magnitude more computations, but the computers have become orders of magnitude…

> Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient.

That's what a software engineer would say who views resources as unlimited and free.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#93
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former fansub translator, it's better for mankind this way. Further thoughts on the matter: https://old.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...

IMO this kind of thing is a symptom of so few people knowing multiple languages. It doesn’t take much time in a second language to realize how much of an art translation is. Heck, even if you only know English, reading a few translations of classic literature should make it obvious. I really hope AI doesn’t totally ruin the market for actually decent translations of books, films, and television by making something “g…

DeppL's business model is exactly this. The words translated per day increases a lot the past few years, because of it. You let DeepL translate the text, and real Translators use it as a starting point.

DeepL is already pretty good, but it still needs a proper translator for the optimal output. That translator just saves a lot of time not having to translate every word.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#94
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This boils down to software development not being free. In VLC's case, the development is funded by several for profit companies (like videolabs) that make their money from stuff they do with VLC (consulting, commercial services, etc.). VLC is a good example of an OSS project that is pretty well run with decades of history that has a healthy ecosystem of people and companies earning their living supporting all that a…

They don’t need designers when they are the free media player that stood the test of time and being used by the masses. It’s true organic bottom up design, tweaked little by little over the years

It's not required. But it could make their product easier to use and more usable for their users. But that's clearly not something the core team values or is passionate about and I appreciate that they have other priorities.

It's common with many OSS projects. There are a few positive exceptions. But this stuff is hard.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#95
post #63
post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

What is the alternative? The results could be cached, but it's probably unlikely that they would need to be used again later, as I imagine most videos are watched only once. Another option would be to upload the generated subtitles to some service or p2p, but I believe that would also problem (e.g. privacy, who runs the service, firewalls for p2p, etc).

Authoritatively-correct subtitles rather than distributed generation and/or publication by anyone and everyone, including AI.

I don't know how many times I've seen subtitles that appear to be based on a script or were half-assed, and don't match the dialogue as spoken at all.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#96
post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

> Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read

I really hope people to stop doing that.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#97
post #81
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. That's just bad destructive art, especially for a foreign language that you partially know. > Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Don't name any, that's what your own eye-ear voice recognition/matching and positioning are for (also reduces the amount of text) > Sometimes the positioning on the screen matter…

> Don't name any, that's what your own eye-ear voice recognition/matching and positioning are for That’s tricky when one or more speakers aren’t visible.

They'd also have to start speaking at the same time and have similar voices to make it tricky

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#98
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we still talking about this? Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient. Computation is really negligible in the grand scheme of things. In the 80s some people also said that our whole world energy would go to computations in the future. And look today. It’s less than 1%. We do orders of magnitude more computations, but the computers have become orders of magnitude…

> Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient. That's what a software engineer would say who views resources as unlimited and free.

Do you not pay for the energy you use?

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#99
post #97
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't name any, that's what your own eye-ear voice recognition/matching and positioning are for That’s tricky when one or more speakers aren’t visible.

They'd also have to start speaking at the same time and have similar voices to make it tricky

You’re assuming that the subtitle user can hear the voice track here.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#100
post #99
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd also have to start speaking at the same time and have similar voices to make it tricky

You’re assuming that the subtitle user can hear the voice track here.

Yes I'm, the other option is the "hearing impaired" variant, let that one have all the extra info
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